Interviews with some of those forced to leave following Russia’s invasion
Editor’s note: The people featured here were interviewed for an article published in the International section on Ukraine’s refugees. Read more of our coverage marking a year of war in Ukraine
Some eight million Ukrainians scattered across Europe after Vladimir Putin began his war a year ago. The vast majority are women and children; most Ukrainian men of fighting age are not allowed to leave. Some of these refugees are building new lives outside Ukraine; others have already returned or plan to do so. Many are stuck in the middle, unable to go home but unwilling to give up hope.
The Economist interviewed dozens of Ukrainian refugees to find out how their lives have changed, and how their host countries are adapting. Their stories are remarkable. Many made agonising choices between safety and family, and their journeys out of Ukraine were often dangerous and distressing. Below are the stories of eight indiuals and couples, whose experiences are typical of millions of others.
Alla,
Berlin
Asked where she was when the war broke out, Alla (pictured above), a middle-aged refugee, immediately begins crying. She was “terrified” when the Russians launched a series of rocket attacks on residential parts of her home town of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, in late February 2022. She and her disabled husband had to take to a bomb shelter before fleeing: first to Lviv, in western Ukraine, and then to Germany, simply because they came across volunteers organising bus transport there.
The Germans she encounters have been nothing but welcoming, she says. “This gives me the will to live.” At least as important has been a strong sense of mutual support among 200-odd other Jewish Ukrainian refugees with whom Alla and her husband have lived in a hotel in Charlottenburg, a district in west Berlin, since August. At the heart of the community is a charismatic rabbi from Dnipro who liaises with city authorities on the refugees’ behalf, relaying information and advice at Friday-night Shabbat dinners.
Alla spends her time learning German, in state-funded integration classes, and caring for her husband. But it is not a full life. She cannot communicate with locals without Google Translate, and misses home; “I don’t see a future here,” she says. But a return to bombed-out Kharkiv, close to the front line and just 50km from Ukraine’s border with Russia, hardly seems imaginable. The city has been largely quiet over the winter, she says. But what about after that?
Natalia,
Wroclaw
On February 24th Russian troops arrived in a small town in the Kherson region, in southern Ukraine. The soldiers were shooting at “everything” as fighter jets soared overhead, says Natalia, who worked in a small restaurant. The mood was one of “total panic”. The subsequent occupation was brutal: the Russians took one of Natalia’s friends into custody, beat him, deprived him of food and water and forced him to praise Vladimir Putin on camera.
Natalia fled to nearby Zaporizhia with her son and mother, only to see the car behind her destroyed by a Russian strike. So she needed little persuasion to flee Ukraine for Poland at the suggestion of a friend. She had to leave her mother behind to look after her diabetic son, who she did not believe would survive the journey. Her solo journey took her through occupied Crimea, thousands of kilometres of western Russia and then into Latvia, and thus the European Union.
Through an agency Natalia found work as a cleaner in Wroclaw, in south-west Poland. But the job was desperately hard and the agency took a large dollop of her salary to pay for her accommodation. Now she works in a factory with more civilised hours and cheaper housing. Her colleagues are all Ukrainian; all of them, she says, have their “good and bad” stories. Her Polish managers laugh when she tries to speak Polish, a language she struggles with, but the locals are generally kind and welcoming. She loves the city, especially its green, open spaces. She has taken up ten-pin bowling. She is able to send part of her salary to her family in Ukraine.
Natalia holds out hope that Ukraine’s troops will liberate the territory she left. If so, she will try to convince her mother to bring her son and join her in Poland. If they come, Natalia says, “We will stay here as long as we can. I see a beautiful future for us here in Wroclaw.”
Evgenia and Artem,
London and Kyiv
“It’s like preparing to give birth,” says Evgenia, of the moment that war erupts in your homeland. “You will always be 0% prepared: when it happens it’s a total shock.” When Russian tanks rolled across the border Evgenia and Artem, her husband, fled Kyiv for western Ukraine with their six-year-old son, Sasha. Evgenia’s cousin was living in Britain and suggested she join her. She filled in the forms and forgot about it. Six weeks later, when she received an email informing her that her application was successful, “I had a panic attack. It hit me that leaving Ukraine actually is a possibility.”
Evgenia and Sasha moved to London, leaving Artem in Kyiv. Things have not always been easy. The family’s commitment to return home has restricted her and Sasha to short-term lets in an extremely tight property market; her current flat in south London is tiny. Britain is dismayingly expensive. But after a difficult start her son is now happy at school, thanks in part to patient, supportive teachers; a nice contrast, says Evegenia, to Ukraine’s disciplinarian “Soviet-style” schools. In the evenings she teaches her son the Ukrainian curriculum, with textbooks proed by a school in Kyiv. She speaks fluent English, and has been able to keep her Ukrainian job working for a software proer. “When I see how some people in Ukraine live,” she says, “I have no right to complain. Look at the Donbas.”
Artem has also struggled with the separation. From his flat in Kyiv, surrounded by his son’s toys and photos of his family, he does not try to conceal his loneliness. “My son and I were never apart for more than a week,” he says. With Ukraine’s economy now geared to war, his work as a location manager for production companies has largely dried up. Having handled a large share of childminding duties, the separation from his son has been especially difficult to bear.
The family will reunite in Kyiv as soon as it feels secure. Every day Sasha asks his mother when they will go home. For now, Evgenia says, “I don’t want him to be in a place that is bombed every ten days.” But she accepts that perhaps her threshold for return is not quite as high as it once was. If the fighting is contained in Ukraine’s east, there are no more blackouts in Kyiv and Western officials say there has been a turning-point in the war—“that’s very important to me”—she will consider it.
In the meantime her circumstances have brought out a certain stoicism. “I’m a creature of habit, I like my home, family, work, routine,” she says. “[Being a refugee] is not my personality.” Like many refugees, she tries to focus on the day-to-day and the things she can change. About everything else, she says, “Don’t stress. Let it go. Lead your life. Things can always get worse, that’s my new motto.”
Aliona,
Berlin
Image: Katrin Streicher
Last year began well for Aliona (pictured). Her career was fulfilling—she was edging into the film industry, which she had long been interested in—and she enjoyed her life in Kyiv. But then came her “worst-ever nightmare”: a war that she had never believed could happen. She decamped to a dacha, and then a small village with friends. The massacre in Bucha, just 25km from Kyiv, confirmed her deepest fears about the Russian invaders. Friends in Berlin, a city she had once worked in, urged her to join them. At first she found their messages irritating, but eventually they won her around. She arrived in May.
Since then she has made several trips back home, for weeks or months at a time. Her work, for a development agency that funds projects in Ukraine, gives these visits a sense of purpose beyond visiting friends and family. She accepts that she is not really integrating in Germany: she spends her time in a “Ukrainian bubble”, and does not have time for language courses. But fresh horizons have opened. When the war broke out, she says, as someone without a family of her own “I had a victim mentality”. But now she sees her freedom as an asset.
For now, Aliona leads a double life. Her movements are shaped largely by the timing of rental contracts in Berlin’s notoriously tight housing market: last year she moved house seven times in three months. Being in Kyiv is “incomparable,” she says. “It’s life on the edge.” She continues to pay rent on her Kyiv flat, partly to support her enlisted landlord. But in Berlin “I feel this desire to explore.” Having arrived in Germany thinking her exile would last only a few weeks, she is now unsure if she would return to Ukraine even in the event of lasting peace. “I had put lots of pressure on myself to decide [where to live],” she says. “But for now, I don’t have to.”
Oksana and Artem,
Leipzig and Kyiv
“Like millions of Ukrainians, we were ready,” says Artem Chapaye, a writer from Kyiv, of his family’s experience when war broke out. With his wife, Oksana, and two young sons, he fled to western Ukraine. Artem immediately signed up for the army. Oksana took the children to Germany,” a country she had some experience with.
Artem says he cried every day for two months when first separated from his sons. Since then the family have reconvened twice, once in Ukraine and once in Germany. Artem has been stationed in western Ukraine, far from the fighting, and Oksana, a sociologist, has a contract with a German university. And yet, “It’s very difficult even in a privileged situation like ours,” he says. Where the parents once pointedly shared child-rearing duties, Oksana is now subject to “forced single motherhood”. The couple do their best to share pedagogical duties, teaching their children the Ukrainian curriculum.
Nor is the family faring especially well in Leipzig, a city in eastern Germany, where they went after it proved impossible to find housing in Berlin. The younger son has struggled in school: when Oksana complained that he was not being taught German, the headmaster told her there was no point as the family wouldn’t stay in the country anyway. And Oksana is infuriated by those elements of the German left that appear to side with the Kremlin. At a talk in Berlin, she was heckled by protestors who blamed NATO for the war and called Ukrainians Nazis. She has had to distance herself from a “fundamentalist pacifist” German friend, too.
The family now plans to return to Kyiv in the summer, although Oksana has grown conscious that she will be removing her sons from friends they have made. As for Artem, his place in the army will keep him from making anything other than brief visits to see his family even after they return. Still, he says, “once a month is easier than twice a year.”
Maksym,
Warsaw
Maksym, a student originally from Dnipro in central Ukraine, fled the country on March 8th, less than three weeks before he turned 18 and therefore would not have been allowed to cross the borders. He didn’t want to leave his family behind but he had friends in Poland, and a cousin in Warsaw willing to put him up. His Polish friends, he said, have become “a second family”, and getting his Polish up to scratch is “not that hard”.
When he left, Maksym was six months into an IT degree in Kyiv. He hopes to restart his studies in Poland, but that prospect has started to drift. His work helping other Ukrainian refugees, especially less-educated workers exploited by rogue Polish employment agencies, now takes up most of his time. “I try to help, but I can’t help everyone,” he says. He sends money to his family in Dnipro, who themselves work with Ukrainians who have been forced from their homes. This work is “very important to them,” says Maksym. “I won’t tell them that they need to come here.”
As in so many refugees, the war has aroused in Maksym a new sense of patriotism. But now that he is of age, he cannot return to Ukraine unless he is willing to stay there. “I would like to live there, but I don’t see a future there,” he says. “I want to study in a country without problems.” Perhaps one day he will go back to Ukraine to help with the rebuilding effort.
Anna,
Wroclaw
Image: Robert Zielinski
“This is the second war in my life,” says Anna (pictured), a lawyer now based in Wroclaw. In 2014 a Russia-backed insurgency forced her to leave Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, along with her husband and their baby. After moving around for years they eventually settled in Dnipro, where they had a second child. Then came February 24th. Five rockets fell near their house, and at 5.25am Anna was blown out of her bed; the explosions filled her bedroom with a ghastly orange glow.
Anna took the children and embarked on a “completely chaotic” journey through Ukraine, punctuated variously by eerie silences and more rocket attacks. After a pit stop with relatives in western Ukraine, the family crossed the border into Hungary. Anna drove and drove with no destination in mind. Eventually, the family wound up in Wroclaw, where a friend of a friend offered accommodation. Anna thought her exile would last three months, at most. “Now I don’t believe the war will ever end,” she says. Her children have been traumatised by their experiences: on New Year’s Eve, with Polish revellers letting off fireworks in the streets, they clung to her in terror.
With no prospect of return, Anna and (from a distance) her husband decided to open a beauty salon in Wroclaw. “I’d never done anything like this before,” says Anna. “Every step was hard.” Her older daughter, 11, is in Polish school and happy; she simply wishes her friends from Dnipro were with her. Her 5-year-old, though, fears she will be abandoned every time Anna leaves her at kindergarten. To avoid confusing the kids, Anna and her husband have agreed not to do distance learning with Ukrainian schools.
Some Poles occasionally give her, and other Ukrainians, a hard time. Wroclaw’s population has swelled by almost one-third since the war began: rents have shot up, and some public services have been strained. But in general the welcome has been extremely warm, and Anna is grateful. “I get it’s hard for people here, too,” she says. As for her, the previous experience after 2014 makes today’s strains more manageable. “We changed our life because we changed our thoughts. That has made it easier this time.”
Anastasia,
Warsaw
Anastasia, a 17-year-old, is from a small town near Kyiv. Last February, fearing the worst, her family fled Ukraine three days before the war broke out. Her parents told their three children it would just be for a month or so, but Anastasia had an inkling her exile would last for much longer, so packed for all seasons. “I couldn’t stop crying for two months,” she says, speaking in the Spoko Cafe in Warsaw, a hangout spot for Ukrainian teenagers. She knew several people who were killed at the front, and missed her grandparents, who had stayed behind.
She recently returned to visit Ukraine, and felt “torn” because it felt so good to be at home. “When I come home I think these are not just Ukrainians I see, they’re my brothers and sisters,” she says. Asked about the biggest challenges she faces in Poland, she replies, “Everything! Simply mentally accepting being here.”
But once she reached Warsaw, Anastasia realised that there was no possibility of return given the situation at home. Her mother’s office in Ukraine was bombed. And so she has started to make commitments to a new life in Poland. She dropped out of medical school to improve her Polish, but plans to enrol again once that’s done; “it’s not super-hard,” she says, although she didn’t speak a word when she arrived in Warsaw. She has not yet made any Polish friends yet, but “would like to”. Her parents are getting by. Her younger brother, though, is struggling with the language. ■
